against him and dethrone him. The King took all possible
precautions to keep that document out of his dominions, and set to
work in return to suppress a great number of the English
monasteries and abbeys.
This destruction was begun by a body of commissioners, of whom
Cromwell (whom the King had taken into great favour) was the head;
and was carried on through some few years to its entire completion.
There is no doubt that many of these religious establishments were
religious in nothing but in name, and were crammed with lazy,
indolent, and sensual monks. There is no doubt that they imposed
upon the people in every possible way; that they had images moved
by wires, which they pretended were miraculously moved by Heaven;
that they had among them a whole tun measure full of teeth, all
purporting to have come out of the head of one saint, who must
indeed have been a very extraordinary person with that enormous
allowance of grinders; that they had bits of coal which they said
had fried Saint Lawrence, and bits of toe-nails which they said
belonged to other famous saints; penknives, and boots, and girdles,
which they said belonged to others; and that all these bits of
rubbish were called Relics, and adored by the ignorant people.
But, on the other hand, there is no doubt either, that the King’s
officers and men punished the good monks with the bad; did great
injustice; demolished many beautiful things and many valuable
libraries; destroyed numbers of paintings, stained glass windows,
fine pavements, and carvings; and that the whole court were
ravenously greedy and rapacious for the division of this great
spoil among them. The King seems to have grown almost mad in the
ardour of this pursuit; for he declared Thomas a Becket a traitor,
though he had been dead so many years, and had his body dug up out
of his grave. He must have been as miraculous as the monks
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pretended, if they had told the truth, for he was found with one
head on his shoulders, and they had shown another as his undoubted
and genuine head ever since his death; it had brought them vast
sums of money, too. The gold and jewels on his shrine filled two
great chests, and eight men tottered as they carried them away.
How rich the monasteries were you may infer from the fact that,
when they were all suppressed, one hundred and thirty thousand
pounds a year – in those days an immense sum – came to the Crown.
These things were not done without causing great discontent among
the people. The monks had been good landlords and hospitable
entertainers of all travellers, and had been accustomed to give
away a great deal of corn, and fruit, and meat, and other things.
In those days it was difficult to change goods into money, in
consequence of the roads being very few and very bad, and the
carts, and waggons of the worst description; and they must either
have given away some of the good things they possessed in enormous
quantities, or have suffered them to spoil and moulder. So, many
of the people missed what it was more agreeable to get idly than to
work for; and the monks who were driven out of their homes and
wandered about encouraged their discontent; and there were,
consequently, great risings in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. These
were put down by terrific executions, from which the monks
themselves did not escape, and the King went on grunting and
growling in his own fat way, like a Royal pig.
I have told all this story of the religious houses at one time, to
make it plainer, and to get back to the King’s domestic affairs.
The unfortunate Queen Catherine was by this time dead; and the King
was by this time as tired of his second Queen as he had been of his
first. As he had fallen in love with Anne when she was in the
service of Catherine, so he now fell in love with another lady in
the service of Anne. See how wicked deeds are punished, and how